PM: Migrant crisis yet to come, EU unlikely to find solution

Speaking at the EastWest Institute think-tank, he stressed that the migrant crisis “has not yet began” and that he was “not optimistic about the EU finding a solution.”

“We have been facing biggest problems since the beginning of the crisis, because we have 7,000 people in Serbia who are not leaving our country, who don’t know what to do with themselves, while we don’t know what to do with them – because they don’t want to stay in our country,” Vucic said.

According to him, 83 percent of migrants coming to Serbia are from Afghanistan, “99 percent of them being men without families – wives, children, parents.”

The prime minister said that his interior minister “joked after he arrived in New York that Serbia had already built a kilometer of a wall,” but reiterated that “our country does not want walls and fences because that will not protect our borders and our country – but we cannot become a parking lot for Afghanis.”

Serbia treats migrants “very well,” he continued, showing solidarity and its humane face, and the country agreed earlier to a system of permanent refugee distribution quotas.

“But the problem is that these people don’t want to stay, and that nobody within Europe (EU) has agreed to the quota system,” Vucic stressed.

He said that a meeting should be held in Vienna on Saturday with the goal of “finding a solution to the migrant crisis,” where German Chancellor Angela Merkel and EC President Jean Claude Juncker will take part, along with representatives of the Balkan migrant route countries.